Doling out our money: How jobless foreigners who go home can still claim benefits here

Employment officers say returning Poles are using EU rules to keep claiming UK handouts for months after returning home

Jobless Eastern Europeans who return home are being paid dole money by the British taxpayer, it emerged last night.

Thousands who leave because they have lost their jobs in the economic downturn could benefit from the £60-a-week handouts.

They stem from a little-known EU directive which says that provided an unemployed worker is seeking a job in their homeland, they can continue to be paid benefits by the country where they were laid off.

Job centre managers in Poland are even holding workshops and seminars on how claimants can keep using the UK for unemployment handouts.

The criteria is that a person must have been claiming Jobseeker's Allowance here before they go home.

Around half of the one million citizens of other former Eastern Bloc countries who flocked to Britain after joining the EU in 2004 are believed to have now left.

Renata Cygan, of the regional job office in Opole, south-west Poland, said: 'We work on the assumption that if someone worked abroad, they should claim benefits there.

'Why should we pay? That's why we're organising information meetings about how to seek benefits abroad.'

Another job centre in Rzeszow says it has received more inquiries about unemployment benefits in one week than it had in the whole of the previous year.

The Government said British workers who lost their jobs in Poland could benefit under the same rules. But many more Polish workers came to the UK than the Britons who went to work there.

Mark Wallace, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'This is typical of crazy EU rules which put so much of a burden on British taxpayers.

'The benefit system was invented as a safety net for people in this country fallen on hard times.

'If you choose to go back to Poland, there is no way you should be allowed to continue claiming off the UK taxpayer.'

It emerged this year that benefits for children living in Eastern Europe were costing taxpayers £28million a year.

Treasury ministers said 34,000 children in Eastern Europe were receiving child benefit supposedly earmarked for British youngsters.

Of the £28million being spent annually to support children in Eastern Europe, £25.7million is going to Polish families.

Parents of 19,054 first-born in Poland were being paid £941 a year at the end of 2007, while £629 a year was paid on behalf of another 12,345 younger children.

Workers from the eight eastern European states which joined the EU in 2004 are entitled under EU rules to claim benefits for children living at home.

British child benefit of £18.10 a week for the first child and £12.10 a week for siblings can be claimed by every parent.

Under reciprocal EU rules, Britons living and working in Poland can claim a maximum of £160 a year in child benefit from the Polish government.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: 'You cannot receive this form of Jobseeker's Allowance unless you have been paying National Insurance contributions.

'The individual would only be eligible for up to a maximum of three months Jobseeker's Allowance support.

'These very specific circumstances would only occur should someone move from the UK while in receipt of contribution-based Jobseeker's Allowance in order to seek work in another EU member state and provided they register with that country's equivalent of Jobcentre Plus.

'British citizens are eligible for the same sort of help from other EU member states.'

Before May 2004, former prime minister Tony Blair placed a block on Eastern Bloc migrants being able to claim contribution-based state handouts.

However, once a migrant has been working and paying taxes in the United Kingdom for a year, they have the same rights as British citizens.

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Doling out our money: How jobless foreigners who go home can STILL claim benefits here